Grooveshark was a lot better than Spotify, both in functionality and in offering, but alas...
Youtube is probably the most complete but (1) I don't want to waste bandwidth on downloading the video every time I try to listen to music and (2) it's missing the discovery component that dedicated music services have.
But why would you download a (probably illegal) rip that is poor quality, when the act of downloading and keeping the rip is probably illegal in itself (not exactly sure about that) from a platform that is notoriously unsuitable for music when you could just download high-quality release from a music tracker specially optimised for this use case?
I mean, if you are ok with doing something (probably) illegal, why not get the best experience out of it?
I agree with your sentiments, but to play devil's advocate grabbing music from youtube protects you from DMCA notices from your ISP, is always available (no having to wait for seeds/peers on more obscure music), and is much safer (for an average person) where content on public trackers has some risk of containing malware/virus/etc.
I believe it downloads the whole video, then extract the sound. At least you're downloading only once, but one of the points of streaming music is not keeping the music on your disk at all.
From what I understand, the audio and video are simply different streams that you can selectively download from the youtube servers. So it is entirely possible to only download the audio, I've done it many times with youtube-dl.
Thanks for mentioning it, I love that tool (even got this on my phone in a Debian subsystem). Still, it's not suitable as a replacement for Spotify: the discovery element is too useful :/
Youtube is probably the most complete but (1) I don't want to waste bandwidth on downloading the video every time I try to listen to music and (2) it's missing the discovery component that dedicated music services have.